Enter interbots, the latest phase in chatbot development enabling bot-to-bot communication. With bot-to-bot communication, chatbots can work together to accomplish tasks—which means they can get accomplish even more than before. You could, for example, ask a bot to delegate tasks to others to complete a task that it otherwise couldn’t do alone. When bots can work together to expand their features and surpass their individual limitations, the possibilities are endless.

What Interbots Mean for Chatbot Development

This new phase in chatbot development means taking a modular approach to using and making bots. With a chatbot development platform, bot makers and users alike can mix and combine chatbots into entirely new ones. Think of it as building a high-tech Frankenstein’s monster: you might combine an already-existing bot that books hotel rooms with another that books flights, creating the ultimate digital travel assistant in the process. The sky’s the limit as you absorb more and more bots’ skills.

We might also find new communities of hobbyists and consumers spring up focused on finding new and unexpected ways to use bots. After designing your bot to fulfill a specific role, you might release it to your brand’s community to iterate and improve as they add new features to it. A chatbot development platform allowing this wouldn’t be very different than IFTTT, which allows users to build and share “recipes” that connect different services together to get more done. By empowering users to connect your interbot with others, you’ll discover new uses for the chatbot—and your community will feel a pivotal role in shaping what it can do.

Interbots Give Rise to Real Digital Assistants

Finally, it may become more common for the average user to have their own personal, representative chatbot interbots. These bots would then go out in the wild and work with others to fulfill their users’ needs. For example, let’s say you want to buy a specific product and want to find it at the best price. Instead of comparing prices in a small handful of stores, your bot could enquire with shop bots to compare dozens—if not hundreds—of listings in a matter of seconds.

If an interbot runs into a problem or is confused by another bot, it could ping its owner to ask for clarification. Users could conceivably access an archive to see how the interbots communicated or finished a task.

Interbots and bot-to-bot communication can revolutionize the way we look at and work with bots. Instead of viewing them just as conversation partners, they can be a powerful development in moving conversational data behind the scenes to power various services. Of course, conversational analytics will be crucial for interbots to analyze their capabilities for sure, and not only humans will be reading their data, interbots themselves will be also reading data of their own and improve themselves with AI-based systems.